Spark

Spark

We are going to build the best parking app San Diego has to offer. Our app will get people out of their car faster. We will transform frustrated, mean-spirited drivers into smiling carefree pedestrians. No more distracted driving with your head on a swivel looking for parking spots. You will be focused on the road and relaxed to your destination. By tracking incoming and outgoing parking events, we will have a precise real time map of all available parking locations in the city. We will harness that data to navigate you to the best available spot - hands free.

I contend that this concept fits well within the underlying ethical principle of vision zero: "it can never be ethically acceptable that people are killed or seriously injured when moving within the road transport system.” We need to optimize our car travel. We need to get people out of cars sooner and our app will do just that. Pedestrians are more safe with less cars around them. While I know that this app does not directly impact high speed corridors. We know densely populated urban areas also need to be addressed. We passionately believe that this is one of many solutions cities will need to fight this complex problem.

Specific uses of data

We spent several hours understanding the GE Smart light sensor data The Postman tool was used to make a REST request to harvest parking zone locations. I was able build a python script to parse the data into geojson and map my results. I am very excited about how powerful this data can be.

We also found parking zone boundaries from the City of San Diego that we planned to use in conjunction to the GE parking zone.

Our app will provide instant utility to residents and tourists. Unlike several apps that need a critical mass of users for it to gain traction. Our solution can start small and scale. All the pieces are in place for us to execute on this vision. The GE Parking API is how we plan detect available parking spots. I believe the city will be excited as I am to help provide additional data that we can leverage.

Despite that our team has demanding day job schedule. We would love to contribute our skills to this problem. I work as a software engineer for FanDuel. Vern is our ‘quant’, he is trained as a physicist currently working as an algorithmic financial trader. Ashley works at a tech startup. We plan to build a robust - but familiar software system. We will leverage our existing relationships and forge new ones as we grow this business.

We see this as a great opportunity to partner with the city and deliver a solution to an age old problem. We would love to see where the future takes us on this work.